Our 2017 Halloween Costumes

Over the years, we've shared a few pictures of ourselves in costume, mostly for Halloween. We're generally not big fans of wearing costumes, but we tolerate it to make our humans happy. (The things we do for those big, silly mostly-hairless apes. Am I right?) And even though we always complain a little at the time, we have to admit that we do look adorable in our outfits. Our previous outfits have included Pokemon, dinosaurs and ladybugs, a tuxedo, and a bumblebee.

We know we're a little late in sharing our costumes this year, but better late than never, right? Who wants to see our Halloween costumes? Okay, here they are:

Lola does not look happy in her pumpkin outfit.

There's a new sheriff in town...

As you may notice, Lola's costume is not fully on. She made it very clear to the humans that she didn't want the strap on the hat connected under her chin, so the humans left it loose. (It's very important to respect your guinea pig's boundaries!)

Guinea Pig Tuxedo Outfit

According to Wikipedia, "The most popular uses of the tuxedo in the United States at present are for formal weddings, galas, balls, formal proms and formal nights on cruises."   What if you're a male guinea pig who's been invited to one of these formal occasions? Sure, that fur coat you were born with is fine for most occasions, but there are special occasions where you may need to kick it up a notch. Case in point, this video:

The humans brought back this tuxedo guinea pig costume from Morugumi in Tokyo, so I'll be prepared for my next formal event! (Bring on the guinea pig wedding invites!)

Is that my size?

It fits. Do I look dapper in this?

All dressed up and nowhere to go!

I looked pretty darn good if I do say so myself, but like all costumes we've tried, I looked forward to getting it off. After all, the fur coat that Mother Nature gave me is the most comfortable outfit of all.

Cavy Savvy 2016 Halloween Giveaway!

Regular readers probably saw our recent post on the Pokemon costumes from Cuddly Cavy Creations. We looked amazing, but did not enjoy getting them on. We figure that turnabout is fair play, so it's about time that we get humans to wear costumes of our choosing!

And we have just the costume in mind. This is a guinea pig mask from Archie McPhee :

Put it on, human! You'd look much better as a guinea pig!

We were thinking we'd just put this on the humans for cute pictures and post it, but then we had a better idea: make it a Halloween giveaway! We haven't done a giveaway in some time, so I think we're overdue.

Here are the giveaway rules:

• You must be a resident of the continental United States.
• You have to be a follower of this blog. To follow us, just click the "join this site" button on the right.
• To enter, leave a comment on this blog post expressing your interest in participating in the contest.
• All entries must be received by October 15th, 2016 at 12:00 pm (US Eastern time) to be eligible.
• One winner will be chosen at random from all eligible entries and announced on this blog on October 15th sometime after the giveaway closes.
• The winner will be instructed to email us to provide us with a mailing address to send the prize to. Winners must provide us with a mailing address within 30 days to receive their prize. (We'd recommend replying ASAP to get it in time for Halloween.)

Good luck!

Product Review: Cuddy Cavies Creations Pokemon Go Costumes

Longtime readers might remember several years back when Lola (1) and Buffy entered a costume contest with costumes from Cuddly Cavies Creations, and won second place. With Halloween just around the corner, the humans decided that it might be nice to get us some new costumes. We don't really get why Halloween is so exciting to humans, but sometimes you just have to play along for their sake. I suppose Buffy and Lola (1) did look great in their costumes. But if the humans really want us to get excited about Halloween, they should give us some treats that we're allowed to eat, like pumpkin.

Anyway, Cuddly Cavies Creations has some new Pokemon costumes that I think a lot of humans will go crazy for. Have you heard about this Pokemon Go craze? It's apparently some big thing where humans will stand around on street corners, staring at their phones and trying to find and catch little creatures by throwing special balls at them. Humans, if we agree to put on these Pokemon costumes, you better not throw anything at us! Deal?

And some fussing (and biting), the humans got us into the costumes:

Top: I'm looking "hot" in my "Charmander-pig" costume! Bottom: Lola's looking adorable in her "Pig-achu" costume.

Costumes are no fun to put on. I'm a bit more relaxed about it, but Lola ended up getting a little nippy. We recommend that you have two humans put on the costumes; one who can support our feet, while the other can snap closed the Velcro. Also, make sure you listen to your guinea pig. If it seems like your guinea pig is getting too stressed out, give up on putting on the costume. It's not worth upsetting us over a few cute pictures.

Despite our complaints about having costumes put on us, we have to admit that we looked great once they're on. We give these costumes 5/5 stars!

Product Review: Piggies Paradise Guinea Pig Subscription Box

Subscription boxes like Birchbox have really taken off. You can find a lot more than makeup and beauty products in them now. For example, there's one called Sock Panda where you can get socks mailed to you every month. There's also one called Bark Box that's full of treats and gifts for dogs. Now, there's even one for us called Piggies Paradise!

We heard of Piggies Paradise recently when the creator offered to let us try it out and review it. (We feel we should mention this in the interest of full disclosure, even though as long-time readers know, we've taken freebies and still given 1-star reviews before.)

Let's see what we got in here...

There were four different products inside the box. Buffy and I then debated what the best way to review this is since we usually just review one product at a time. We decided that we'll briefly review each item here (leaving open the possibility of a more in-depth review in a later post if we have more to say on them), and then finally give an overall review to Piggies Paradise.

Oxbow Vitamin C Supplement Tablets

Wow, these things smelled good! We knew we wanted them even before the humans took them out of the package.

Open it! Open it! Open it!

Once the humans opened it up and gave us each one, it turned out they tasted as good as they smelled. We think these things will be a great substitute for liquid vitamin C that needs to be fed through a syringe for when we have a pet-sitter. 5/5 stars!

All Living Things Bumble Bee Halloween Costume

I volunteered Buffy to try this one on:

You look great!

This bee look a bit annoyed with her costume on; it's a good thing that stinger wasn't real! Even though Buffy isn't crazy about wearing costumes, she looks so good that you've got to give this costume 5 stars!

National Geographic Small Animal Wood Wreath

We reviewed a somewhat similar product to this one in the past: the Busy Bunny's Chew Ring. There are some significant differences between that product and this one, however. This one has a wooden hook so it can hang down. This one has a thing ring of tiny logs, rather than a skinny strings of wood weaved together. This one also has a pine cone in the middle of it. (Pine cones are fine for guinea pigs as long as they have been sterilized.)

Yes, I see it.

This seemed like a fine product, but it just never captured our interest beyond a couple courtesy nibbles. 2/5 stars.

National Geographic Power Snap Small Animal Treats

Last up, we have some treats from National Geographic:

Is that granola?

On the plus side, this treat claims that "your purchase supports the conservation of animals and their habitats." However, there is a long list of ingredients on these treats, and a few of them gave us pause. Therefore, we'd like to hold off on reviewing these until we have enough time to do the research on these ingredients, and we'll do a separate post about it. For now, we'd just like to point out that the ingredients include sugar and corn syrup, and guinea pigs should not have too much sugar.

The Verdict on Piggies Paradise

Rating a subscription box like Piggies Paradise is tricky, because the "product" we're reviewing is actually a bundle of other products. Not only that, but it's also the concept of getting a bundle of products of a certain type (guinea pig products, in this case) on a regular basis. Not every product on this box was a home run; we weren't too excited by the wood wreath, for example. However, those Oxbow Vitamin C Supplement Tablets were amazing! We wanted to chew through the lid to get at those things! Based on what we've seen so far, we'll give Piggies Paradise 4.5 out of 5 stars for having a great concept and some products we liked, but also at least one product with at least one or two ingredients that weren't good.

We've been reviewing guinea pig products for a while now, and one thing we've learned is that you can't trust companies to only use safe, healthy ingredients/materials in their. We generally trust Oxbow to put out good products, but we've seen some real junk coming out of other companies, such as sickly-colored lollipop treats full of stuff we shouldn't eat, willow balls with random peanuts inside of them, and a grass tunnel with burlap unnecessarily added, which can cause digestive blockages. So Piggies Paradise has their work cut out for them, trying to find enough new things to put in the box without including unhealthy or dangerous products. Other than the treats with the added sugar, we think they're doing a great job so far, and hope they can keep it up! We'll keep reviewing Piggies Paradise boxes as we receive them and let you know our thoughts.

If you want to give Piggies Paradise a try, they've been nice enough to give a special coupon code for Cavy Savvy readers. The code is: CAVYSAVVY10 (in all caps). Their website is:

https://piggiesparadise.cratejoy.com/

Guinea Pig Valentine's Day Gifts

According to a survey by the National Retail Federation, Americans will spend $815 million on their pets this year on Valentine's Day. We don't know how much of that $815 million is going towards guinea pigs, but given that there were 847,000 households with guinea pigs in 2007, it could be a fair amount.

What would make a good valentine's day gift for your guinea pig? Well, Cuddly Cavies has a few Valentine's Day costumes:

Girl guinea pig Valentine's Day costume includes costume and hat ($13)

Valentine top hot & vest costume ($13)

For those who didn't plan ahead and order costumes, however, we recommend food. Good food is always a great way to show your guinea pig you love and appreciate them. For Valentine's day, you should give us something heart-shaped. Strawberry slices and Oxbow treats are what our humans used in the past to give us a happy Valentine's day.

Guinea Pigs in Hats

Although we generally try to stick to informative posts, every now and then, we'll come across something that's just too fun not to share. This time, it's a site devoted to guinea pig wearing hats:

http://www.guineapigsinhats.com/

In honor of this fun site, we're going to share our own hat-wearing pictures, thanks to some guinea pig-sized hats from Vietnam that a human friend brought us:

Don't I look cool in my new hat?

I don't know... I feel ridiculous. What's the deal with these hats, anyway?

These are Asian conical hats designed to protect from sun and rain. 

We look so good, we may just have to submit our pictures to that site!

PetSmart Costume Contest

After our most recent post, I'm sure you can't wait to see our costumes. We won't keep you in suspense any longer:

Here's Lola in her dinosaur costume.

And here I am in my ladybug costume.

It was a little scary to have the humans put the costumes on us because we didn't know why they were strapping things around our legs and bellies. The humans thought it would be a good idea for us to participate in the PetSmart Howl-O-Ween contest, despite how we're still recovering from being blessed. The outside world is terrifying! I know there's some good stuff out there, but you need to give us enough recovery time. I think three months minimum between adventures would be good. We went in our carriers and new costumes to PetSmart, and pulled our costumes off during the car ride. The humans then had to put them on us again! It was quite a day. Our costume competition was more of those hairy beasts we saw during the blessing:

The humans did a bad job with this picture. It doesn't show how stiff the competition really was. There were dogs wearing prisoner outfits and all kinds of other crazy stuff.

The competition was judged by who got the most applause for their costume. We came in second place, and got a free toy (which we plan to review soon). So I guess we should thank the humans for dragging us to thing after all.

Thanks, humans!

Now never, ever do that again!